happy little details...

How many times this past weekend did I expect Sir David Attenborough to step forward from behind a car perhaps, or maybe from behind a mountain of frozen dirty snow and to grab me by the arm, softly of course, and turning to a quiet camera team with a giant fuzzy microphone to explain how "lucky of a primate" I was. Thank you Sir. And thank you for that edit that led us to an open landscape and some happily singing Neandertal children. (Why "lucky primate" though? Lucky to be in the right place at the right time and still do the wrong thing sometimes?) Looking at some works at the Outsider Art Fair, it was almost tempting to deliver myself to a neuro-diverse madical facility, just to get some time off and to just draw all day and night. And maybe some ambitious doctor would also give me a camera and a little toy (a bear, or perhaps a little pony?), and I would rush into the sanatorium gardens, to take pictures of immense landscapes and blurry fields of blooming flowers. The doctor would use the funds gained through the sale of my "crazy stuff" to afford careless evenings with a semi-pretty, though greedy young nurse from former Yugoslavia. (Not sure why I had to say that, but it somehow made sense as I was writing it.) The nurse would then fall in love with me, the creative idiot, I would not return her advances, or maybe, by accident, the wrong way. She would develop a strong hate relationship towards me, she would try to convince the Doctor to somehow get rid of me, in some very painful way, and after he refused, since I were a nice source of tax-free income for him, she would take my life into her own hands, and deliver me to that other place, where I no longer needed to even think about drawing or taking pictures, but where I could perhaps be much more useful to some garden plants. WHich is another useful dream of mine anyway. Looking at the outsider art show brought a mix of inspiration and that sad feeling that what I was looking at was the result of deliberate and repeated neuro-exploitation. Maybe there were no nurses involved, but perhaps neighbors, nuns and landlords? The fumes of injustice somehow felt paralyzing. Somebody was daring enough to write "Value $375" in crooked letters in sharpie onto the back of one bold drawing of a woman. The writing was clearly visible (thanks to the miracles of chemical engineering), and somehow more so than that little laser printed museum-like note, describing the artist, the title, the year, the dimensions and the amount of $7000. I think there was a little red dot next to the number, though I am not quite sure. Maybe the red dot was just a floater in my left eye, still burned in there... Oh, God bless them all. I had a bit of a similarly confused feeling (though much milder) when looking at some crudely cut pieces of wood on broken coffee tables in the guts of that interior decoration store in Dumbo. Everything in the place seemed to be broken. The flaws of most pieces of furniture were very apparent. The chairs and tables that looked whole were either incredibly ugly, or had this smirk that hinted that they might be wood-carved mass-murderers. Some of the pieces were just indescribable. Some child in a remote village in the far east must have been forced to carve some animal with a wooden knife, perhaps. The end result was supposedly a "butter dish"... "worth" $125. What disgusting sense of humor. I craved a Starbucks coffee after all this. It felt as if it were a high quality item, at a super bargain price. And how insanely luxurious would it feel to put my lips onto one of those plastic "solo" covers, fresh from the polymer factory, wedged on top of a pristinely white recycled paper-cup and to suck through that tiny pill-shaped opening, some disgusting, bitter, dirty hot liquid with the taste of bad breath. (I ended up getting a tripple Espresso with (free!) whipped cream and tons of sugar (free!), as it appeared to be the best knock-out-deal among all of the bad deals, the best $2.50 to invest as dinner replacement therapy.) I am a bit worried these days. Todd warned me that if I continue in as shy of a way as now, I am going to end up as a really bad version of Henry Darger, I will be found on the floor of my apartment, surrounded by Pepto Bismol bottles, and on the shelves will be piles and piles of drawings and photographs of little bears and of food and of just shapes fighting and fighting for a gentler, happier world. I guess I am running, really quickly, to nowhere (which is oddly enough built from the words "now" and "here"... if one puts one's mind to it.) Drawing late into the night on Saturday felt incredibly beautiful actually. The entire weekend was a time filled with magic. Things are very amazingly incredible and unbelievably wonderful in many ways. Sir David Attenborough just stepped into the apartment, with his crew, he is turning towards them and: "This one here is reliving a Karl Spitzweg painting, all including the improper use of writing utensils, boxes and old books. Note also that he chose as his dwelling the place right under the roof of an old building, and that he does not have so much as a real bed." If I bite Sir David now, will the moment be edited away, or just celebrated in one of those behind the scenes chapters on a DVD?... oh and... "how many times per day do you have rice?" "I guess two... no wait, three... often. I mean it does not have to be this way. I do not survive on rice alone. The lunch I had today just included some rice. And I am also trying to introduce some variety. That bag of basmati bought in the Indian Rite Aid on church street is bound to last for another two months or so, but I am spicing things up, mixing elements in. It is good, I think." I had just set the rice cooker to give me a beep at 6:10 am and to have some wild rice with orzo ready for me. I used half a package of that special mix bought from the very friendly Lebanese ladies on seventh avenue. The good thing about rice was that I could not just eat it when raw and that it would not spoil right away if I did not touch it for a while. Okay, I think I should really clean the floor now...